Dancing in Life's Whirling Embrace!

Religion

August 09, 2019

Human beings are storytellers. Part of the philosophical tradition that informs yoga, and is particularly a feature of Kripalu Yoga, the practice I study, is this question of tat and sat, trying to attend to what is true and real. What are the stories we tell? How true and real are they? What kinds of suffering arise when we act as though something is true and real but it is not? I could, for example, tell myself the story that I can practice yoga like I did in my twenties, a story which can lead to great unhappiness as I live with both more arthritis and neurological disease that I didn’t have in as great a degree as then. Or, I could tell myself the story that I can’t practice yoga at all because my sense of balance is erratic at best, and then have unhappiness in my body from muscles that could be used and are not and fascia that isn’t gliding and stretching as it evolved to do and grows stickier and stiffer. Both stories can create suffering. What seems most true and real at this moment is that I can practice yoga asana, pranayama (breath practices), ethics (yamas and niyamas), one-pointed concentration and meditation, and that these will look and feel differently than how I practiced decades ago, just as one day differs from another.

As I try to understand how stories shape my life, I find it helpful to ask what a story serves. Perhaps that story was once protective or encouraging. Perhaps that story was always harmful but I accepted it for what seemed good reasons at the time. Perhaps the story needs a little reshaping, reframing, and adapting to serve the now. A great deal of literary and religious scholarship examines how we reshape, reframe, and adapt stories to changes in our world. Floods resculpt the world from what it was to a new shape: the stories of flood narratives follow. The world dries and develops a new form, river ways and floodplains becoming deserts: the flood narratives change, becoming more metaphorical or allegorical.

This week, we reach the Book of Deuteronomy, which begins by retelling the story of the Israelites. Why is there this need to retell the story in a different way? Consider what the Babylonian exile does to the story of the Holy granting a homeland forever. For a people in exile, the story needs to change, to one of continued promise and to being remembered, and, also, to the idea that home is possible in some future generation. Scholars reading Deuteronomy observe that the story seems reframed and retold for folks surviving in exile and in other places authorizes Josiah’s religious reforms, dating the reform sections to about the 7th century BCE and the historical narrative section to the time of the Babylonian exile. In other words, baked into the Torah are multiple tellings, frames, and views of the same story, reflecting our need to adapt our stories depending on what we are facing. (Indeed, this is a feature of the Bible, and why I don’t teach or study the Bible as a single unified book but as a library of texts, some of which agree and some of which conflict, and that includes Christian Scriptures and well as the Hebrew Bible.) Part of how we define ourselves is through the stories we tell. For example, when one tells the story “make America great again” there is an appeal to some golden age that never was except, maybe, for a few wealthy white guys. When we tell the history of exclusion and slavery and lack of rights, and the long, often bloody fights to be more diverse and more inclusive, we are addressing another history with different moral centers. Ancient historiography doesn’t bother to tend to the social location of the authors or expected readers/listeners; that tends to be something we have to study and assess and poke away at for ourselves. So we want to read for the differences.

This week’s reading (Deuteronomy 1:1-3:22) begins with retelling the story of the passage away from Mount Horeb (or Sinai, or Pisgah) toward what will become the people’s lands that they seize from others already there. Interestingly, the Holy seems to kick the people off the mountain for staying overly long, like that sacred mountain was going to be their homeland and they weren’t going further to another promised land. Moses speaks of how leadership was assigned and leadership’s duties (omitting the whole story of his father-in-law’s involvement that we have heard before), and then the travels from one inhabited land (not wilderness) to another. There’s still the rebellion, the sulking, and the punishments of those who rebelled and sulked still are not to make it to the promised land. That’s when the people turn and march off into the wilderness. The wilderness is spoken of directly as a seasoning ground, a place of punishment, a distance from doing what the people so badly want, creating home. For a people in exile, that story gives meaning to current suffering. We don’t need to literally be exiled; many of us today feel alienated, frightened by, or in danger where we are living. Approaching this time as a seasoning ground, a place of growth and testing and change preparing for the future can give us needed direction, meaning and purpose. Later, when the people are really truly ready, they march through and conquer one land after another. Some of that readiness is as a military unit, ready to lead and follow. Some of that readiness may be in trusting the Holy. Deuteronomy has Moses summarize the story just before the people are to head off to battle with Joshua to finally claim their land. But the many, many other themes of becoming a free people are missing from this retelling. What can be justified from this remembering of the story of seeking home? What can encourage us if we’re feeling alienated, frightened by or in danger of where we live right now?

A people once without a homeland might fight to gain a homeland. What takes a much longer time to tell in other versions is condensed. What Numbers spends story after story telling us of how people mumble and rebel and yearn for the fleshpots of Egypt is swept up into a few more succinct chapters. If this was written for those in the Babylonian Exile, it is a reminder right from Moses’s lips: you are not forsaken or forgotten and you will be called again to a place you can know is your home; the covenant is not broken for this is how we once lived as we sought to find our place in the world. That’s a powerful promise and a powerful covenant in a time when most folks thought gods were supremely local and/or defeated by invading armies and their gods. It is still a motivating story if we feel displaced, dispossessed, in exile and still trying to live faithfully. On the sacred mountain, out in the wilderness, trekking through hostile lands, we are still in covenant with the Holy and still the Holy’s people. Unlike Leviticus and Numbers, Deuteronomy is less about the making of a free people than the ways of being a people in exile and a people embracing Josiah’s religious reforms.

After a week with more mass shootings driven by toxic stories, stories generating more suffering, we do not have to seek very far to find the ways stories can add to trouble. After a week with many tending the wounded, planting and caring for the land, working for greater equity and kindness, offering one another help to their cancer treatment or to have food on the table, and giving generously to bring more hope and compassion to bear in community after community, we do not have to seek very far to find the ways stories can increase care, play, compassion, hope, and love. But we do have to choose which stories serve the world we want to live in. Personally, I prefer the world with increasing care, play, compassion, hope, and love. That is a world directly answering those stories generating more suffering, more fear, more rage, and more hopelessness with alternatives that nurture life and well-being for all. Choosing that, day after day, decision by decision, can be difficult. But for me, easing suffering and finding more joy and hope for all is a good story.

So take some time this week and reflect on the stories you tell of your people, your communities, your homes, your belonging, your covenants, your faithful promises. How have those changed over time and in differing circumstances? How has the story’s fundamentals remained but the interpretation and the emphases changed? We human beings are storytellers and meaning makers. How do we shape and how are we shaped by the stories we tell and live? How easily do we reach to justify violence when we are afraid or angry? How easily do we reach for compassion when we are suffering? How might we feel caught in a story that doesn’t help us survive right now? How might other people’s stories be affecting us, adding to suffering, drawing us toward actions we might otherwise never consider?

August 01, 2019

There are times in a devout person’s life where we will want to make vows. We might take on a practice of abstaining from something we enjoy as an offering. We might vow to undertake prayer five times a day for a certain period of time. We might take a vow of enoughness, choosing not to acquire more wealth than we need for day to day living and giving anything extra away. We may take marital vows, of how we wish to treat the one we are marrying and how they shall be with us. We may take vows of celibacy, to devote all our energy in service to the greater good or in devotion to the sacred. A vow is a faithful promise that we are going to fulfill. So when Unitarian Universalists covenant (are bound in a faithful promise) to affirm and promote the inherent worth and dignity of every person, that’s a vow that requires daily efforts to fulfill. Exactly how we end up promoting the inherent worth and dignity of every person may present differently depending on our life circumstances, gifts, and abilities. And there will be, as I have said many times before, people we would like very much not to affirm their inherent worth and dignity, our personal exceptions list. Except vows rarely come with clauses of exemption or exception.

Vows are challenging precisely because they ask more of us than is easy, routine or habitual. Vows can help us change spiritually, emotionally, physically and mentally as we pursue fulfilling these faithful promises. When we vow to nurture equity, compassion and justice, we approach life very differently than when we may be comfortably supported by inequities, or when we would rather be stony-hearted toward someone, or when justice seems rather more difficult than accepting the status quo. This vow challenges us to change so we experience, perceive, and live life differently than before we made this faithful promise.

Vows in ancient times and even now often have a component of sacrifice in hopes of achieving some blessing. We might think about the last time something awful happened and we found ourselves spontaneously promising the Holy if only our loved one would be okay or if we can find a way through some seemingly impossible situation. When my father was struck by a vehicle moving at considerable speed, I know I was praying the entire way to the hospital that he would survive and be all right. Bargaining is, in contemporary faith development theory, viewed as something that we do if we have a less mature faith. If we’re praying “Lord, I’ll give up snacks for a month if my team can just win” then yes, that may be so. But prayers and promises of intercession out of compassion and for love and justice are not reflective of an immature faith. And the kinds of vows we might take, for example, in hopes our family will be blessed with children, or our communities might thrive after major employers pull out of the area are not. They reflect the real truths of our lives, where we are suffering, where our communities are suffering, where our world is suffering, and our attempts to seek to mitigate that suffering without adding to anyone else’s pain. Whether our vows are sacred promises to each other witnessed by the Holy, or holy promises to the One to seek a blessing, or faithful promises to see change in ourselves and our world at large, these promises matter.

And that is why I struggle with this week’s passage from Numbers (30:2-36:13). Not only is there a huge theological justification for violence in the second part of the passage, but the first part speaks about how women’s faithful promises can only be fulfilled if her father or her husband approves. Why? Well, when this passage was set forward, women most frequently had to have the protection of men and had the status of dependents. Independent women, such as widowed or divorced women, or Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah (a/k/a Zelophephad’s daughters, known by their father, not their mother) are recognized as separate people whose vows are of equal weight to any man’s. This issue of dependent or independent women’s vows was of some concern in the ancient days, because as Adele Berlin notes in the Jewish Study Bible (2nd Edition) “The Dead Sea Scrolls, however, placed almost equal weight on the oaths of adult females and limited a husband’s or father’s right of annulment to oaths and vows which transgress the laws of the Torah.” (note on verses 30:4-13). Today, adult daughters living with their parents and wives are not necessarily dependents, but active independent agents in their lives, regardless of their financial independence or dependence. As long as the faithful promise isn’t committing resources that aren’t ours to commit to fulfilling it, the vows are freely given and thoughtfully made, I believe that each person’s vows matter.

Sometimes, though, we can’t be faithful people and keep the vows we have made. Vows, for example, made in a relationship that becomes abusive, should be nullified. Or our circumstances change and to keep those vows is to injure ourselves or another or require stealing from ourselves or another. Some folks, for example, are encouraged to take vows of chastity because of their sexual orientation. This is a vow of injury to one’s self if done for reasons other than freely choosing to give their primary relational focus energy to the sacred. I want to note that plenty of faithful people manage to live into their sacred callings without needing a promise of chastity. For it to meaningful, that faithful promise needs to be freely given. Vows thoughtfully made are intensely personal and weighty spiritual practices. How we promise does indeed matter and each of us needs to be free to make faithful promises as part of our spiritual lives and practices if we so choose.

What are the vows you have made? What vows have challenged you to change? And what vows turned out to be vows that couldn’t be faithfully kept? How do your faithful promises affect your relationships with this Earth, one another, yourself, and the Holy?

July 26, 2019

This week’s section of Numbers (25:10-30:1) sees the people preparing to figure out the appropriate shares of their future lands. Remember, this is a community in which land is the means to freedom, independence, and survival. Without land, the people would be forced to find employment with others or face indenture or slavery again. While some might have the skills to set up independently, and while the Levites will be taken care of from the portions set aside for the Holy, for the greater numbers of peoples, a share in a free future means access to land. Surprisingly, in the middle of this portioning we meet the petition of Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah, Zelophehad’s daughters. Zelophehad has died in the wilderness and left no son to inherit. His daughters petition for a fair share for their family. And the Holy agrees, that is what would be just.

In a culture where few are bound by the laws of primogeniture and women inherit wealth, lands, debts, and businesses regularly, it might be a challenge to pause for a moment and consider what principles are set forward in saying yes, Tirzah, Hoglah, Noah, Milcah and Mahlah are to be given a fair share to make a livelihood for their family. Without a share, these free people would have to find employment with others, or face indenture or slavery, or forced marriages in order to survive. A fair share is part of the conditions of trying to be free people.

That leads us to consideration of how inequities can be inherited and even multiply. Just as great fortunes can be inherited and multiplied to massive wealth, lack of opportunity and its consequences also can be inherited and multiplied. Laws and policies both might contribute. The call at the end of American slavery for 40 acres and a mule, drawn from the confiscated plantations that had exploited those 3.9 million enslaved people and their ancestors, would have dramatically changed the United States and race relations. General Sherman’s Special Field Order 15 did divide confiscated sea island plantations into 40 acres shares for newly freed families. As Henry Louis Gates, Jr. teaches us, the originators of the that idea were African American clergy who met with Sherman. After 40,000 acres had been claimed, in 1865 President Andrew Johnson overturned the order and returned the land to the previous plantation owners, undoing a share of what would have radically improved the lives of the newly freed people. Once that was done, the sharecropping system expanded, indenturing many more freed people, not uncommonly, to the same land owners who had previously owned their family members. The struggle for equality was made exponentially harder by first making it more difficult to have equity, a share, in the wealth that made America.

Imagine the formerly enslaved Israelites without land. Without land, the foundation of wealth in agricultural societies, they were at a distinct disadvantage compared to the people who did have land. Without land, they were at risk in another time of famine, of becoming enslaved again as they did when they went into Egypt. That is why Mahlah, Noah, Hoglah, Milcah, and Tirzah are granted a fair share, a chance to ensure their family can stay free.

When we speak about reparations for slavery today, it is because of the truth that the American economy and much wealth was created on the backs of those enslaved people. Because of President Johnson’s decision, those people were denied a fair share to start their new lives as free people. Inherited inequities and disadvantages can multiply, just as inherited wealth can, until we start to ascribe certain traits to some people and not to others in the language of meritocracy, when in truth there was no equitable playing field for folks. Zip code matters tremendously for educational opportunity. Land and where you live still very much matters. A fair share recognizes that for free people to have a just opportunity to excel in life, all must have access to the means to create enoughness to care for their families and provide for the future.

When we speak about whether asylum seekers should have any assistance in settling, or folks who have struggled with hard times have any support in trying to live a decent life, we are speaking about offering each other a fair share in our lives together, an entry, a welcome, a chance to do with our differing gifts what we can for the good of all. The hard-heartedness that denies access to equitable opportunity, which might include, for example, quality childcare while folks go to work or more funds to schools where property values are lower is not how we are called to be. We are called to advocate for justice, for a fair share here and now, which means assisting the vulnerable and dispossessed and recognizing their claims for a part of what’s needed to thrive as legitimate, fair, and blessed.